PDF Editor Online Free — Edit Any PDF in Your Browser

Free online PDF editor: add text, highlight, whiteout, sign, draw, fill forms and reorder pages. Local by default and no watermark - uploaded only if you share.

Rate this tool

Drop a PDF here to start editing

Or click to choose a file — up to 100 MB

Processed on your device. Nothing is uploaded unless you press Share.

About this tool

Wrklyst's PDF editor opens any PDF and lets you change it directly in the browser — add and edit text, highlight or strike through passages, white out whatever should not be there, sign it, drop in an image, fill an existing form, and reorder, rotate, duplicate or delete pages. Every one of those operations happens on your own machine. The file is read and rewritten by JavaScript running on this page, so editing and downloading involve no upload at all. That matters more for editing than for almost any other PDF task, because the documents people edit are the sensitive ones: signed contracts, filled-in tax paperwork, medical forms, offer letters, invoices with bank details on them. Most free online editors ask you to hand those over to a server before you can do anything at all. Here the only action that uploads is Share, which exists so you can send someone a link, tells you plainly that it is uploading, and deletes the file 24 hours later. Everything else has nothing to delete.

How to Edit a PDF Online

1
Drop your PDF onto the page or click to browse. It opens immediately in an editable workspace showing every page, with a thumbnail rail down the side and the full tool set on the left. Nothing is sent anywhere — the progress you see is your own browser reading the file.
2
Edit it. Click anywhere to add text, drag to highlight or white out a region, use the pen for freehand notes and signatures, drop shapes and arrows, add a sticky note, insert an image, or stamp today's date. If the PDF has fillable form fields, the Fill Forms tool detects them and shows you how many it found. Select anything you have added to move it, resize it from any of eight handles, restyle it, or delete it, and Ctrl+Z undoes any step — including page deletions.
3
Rearrange the document if you need to. In the pages rail you can drag pages into a new order, rotate any page in 90° steps, duplicate one, insert a blank sheet, or delete a page outright. Then click Download: your browser builds the finished PDF and hands it straight to you.

Why Edit PDFs with Wrklyst

Local by Default — Uploaded Only If You Share: Editing and export both run in this browser tab. Open your developer tools, edit a document and download it, and you will see no upload at any point. The single exception is the Share button: to give someone else a link, the finished PDF has to reach a server, so that one action uploads it and says so before it does. Those files are deleted automatically after 24 hours. Never press Share and your document never leaves your device.
No Watermark, Ever: The PDF you download is the PDF you made. We do not stamp a logo across your work, we do not degrade the output to advertise a paid tier, and we do not limit you to three documents a day before asking for a card.
Real Text, Not a Flattened Picture: Text you add is written into the PDF as text with a real embedded font, so it stays selectable, searchable and copyable in any reader. A lot of browser editors rasterise the whole page to a JPEG on export, which quietly destroys the searchability of the original document.
Highlights That Actually Read as Highlights: The highlighter uses a multiply blend, exactly as a physical one does, so the words underneath stay sharp and legible. Editors that fake it with a semi-transparent block wash out the very text you were trying to draw attention to.
Page Surgery Included: Reordering, rotating, duplicating, deleting and inserting blank pages are part of the same editor, so you do not have to export to a separate merge or split tool halfway through a job and lose your annotations doing it.
Undo That Covers Page Changes Too: Ctrl+Z steps back through page deletions and reorders as well as annotations. Deleting the wrong page is at least as common as typing the wrong word, and an undo stack that only knows about text is the kind of half-feature that costs someone an afternoon.

When Do You Need a PDF Editor?

Editing is rarely about redesigning a document. It is almost always about a small, specific change to a file you cannot regenerate.

Signing a Contract Without Printing It: Draw or type your signature, place it on the signature line, stamp the date next to it, and download. No printer, no scanner, and no emailing the agreement to a third-party service on the way.
Filling In a Form Someone Sent You: If the PDF has real form fields, the editor finds them. If it is a flat scan with printed boxes — which most are — you can place text anywhere you like and tick boxes with the shape tools, which works regardless of how the form was built.
Redacting Before You Forward Something: The whiteout tool covers a salary line, a home address, or a bank account before the file goes to someone who should not see it. Draw the box, and the region underneath is painted over in the exported file.
Correcting a Typo in a Final PDF: The original .docx is on a laptop you no longer have, or the person who made it has left. Whiteout the wrong word, type the right one in a matching size, and the fix is invisible in the finished document.
Marking Up a Draft for Someone Else: Highlight the passages that need work, strike through what should go, and drop sticky notes explaining why. The reviewer gets one annotated PDF instead of a separate list of page-and-line references.
Fixing a Badly Scanned Document: Rotate the pages that came out sideways, delete the blank sheet the feeder pulled through twice, and reorder anything that went in out of sequence — without leaving the editor or losing your annotations.

Wrklyst vs Other Ways to Edit a PDF

There are four realistic options for changing a PDF. Here is where each one genuinely wins and where it does not.

Method	Verdict	What that means
Adobe Acrobat Pro	The most capable, and the most expensive	Genuine paragraph reflow, OCR, preflight and redaction that provably removes underlying data. If you edit PDFs professionally every day it is worth the roughly £15–20 a month. For changing a date on a contract twice a year it is not.
Smallpdf / iLovePDF	Capable, but your file goes to their servers	Both upload the document, process it remotely, and delete it after a retention window — typically an hour. Both also cap free usage at a couple of tasks a day and push you toward a subscription. The editing is good; the privacy model is a promise rather than a property.
Sejda	Good editor, hard limits	One of the better free web editors, with a similar tool set. It processes server-side and restricts free use to three documents per hour and 50 pages per document. Fine occasionally, frustrating on a long file.
Word or Google Docs	Free, but it rebuilds the document	Importing a PDF converts it to a document and back again, which reflows the layout, substitutes fonts and frequently mangles tables and columns. Workable for a text-heavy report, unusable for anything where the layout is the point — forms, invoices, certificates, contracts.
Wrklyst PDF Editor	Free, unlimited, and local unless you share	Annotation, text, signatures, forms and full page management, with no watermark, no daily cap and no page limit — because there is no server cost for us to ration. The trade-off is honest: we do not do true paragraph reflow of the original text or OCR of scanned pages. For those, Acrobat is the right tool.

Tips for Better PDF Editing

Match the font before you retype. When you whiteout a word and replace it, switch the font to Serif for documents set in Times and pick a size that matches the surrounding line — a 14pt sans correction in a 11pt serif paragraph is what makes an edit obvious.
Use keyboard shortcuts. V selects, T adds text, L highlights, W is whiteout, B is fill background, P is the pen, N drops a note and G opens the signature panel. Escape always returns you to the select tool.
Use Fill background instead of whiteout on coloured paper. Whiteout is always white, so on a tinted table row or a letterhead it leaves a pale scar. Fill background takes any colour — match the paper and the correction disappears, or pick a tint to shade a block deliberately.
Draw your signature once, at a large size. The editor trims the transparent margin automatically, so a big confident signature scales down cleanly — a small cramped one scaled up will not.
Zoom in before fine work. Whiteout boxes and highlight ranges are far easier to place accurately at 150–200% than at fit-width, and zoom is purely visual so it never changes what you have already placed.
Check the pages rail before downloading. Reordering and deleting are easy to get one step wrong, and the thumbnails show you the finished sequence at a glance.
Remember that Ctrl+Z covers page operations. If you delete the wrong page, undo brings it back along with every annotation that was on it.

Frequently asked questions

Is this PDF editor really free, and is there a watermark?

Editing is free and unlimited, with no watermark on the file you download and no cap on pages or documents per day. We can offer that because the work happens on your computer rather than on servers we have to pay for. Downloading the finished file requires a free account; there is no paid tier gating any editing feature.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

Not for editing or downloading. The PDF is read and rewritten by JavaScript in this browser tab, which you can verify yourself: open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and edit and download a document. You will see no upload request. One feature is different, by necessity. The Share button creates a link for someone else to open, and a link has to point at something, so pressing it uploads the finished PDF to our storage. The dialog says so before you send the link, the file is deleted automatically after 24 hours, and if you were signed in when you created the link you can revoke it sooner. If you never press Share, nothing about your document is transmitted.

Can I edit the text that is already in the PDF?

You can cover existing text with the whiteout tool and type replacement text on top, which is how most corrections are made and works on any PDF. What this editor does not do is reflow the original text the way a word processor would — click into a paragraph and have the rest of it re-wrap around your change. That requires reconstructing the document's internal text layout and is where a paid tool like Acrobat genuinely earns its price. For fixing a typo, a date, a name or a figure, whiteout-and-retype is faster anyway.

Can I fill in a PDF form?

Yes, and there are two cases. If the PDF has real interactive form fields, the Fill Forms tool detects them and reports how many it found; the values you enter are written into the fields and flattened into the page so they display in every PDF reader, including ones with poor form support. If the form is a flat scan with printed boxes — which most downloaded government and HR forms are — you can place text anywhere on the page and tick boxes with the shape tools. That approach works on any form regardless of how it was made.

Does the whiteout tool actually remove the hidden text underneath?

It paints an opaque rectangle over the region in the exported PDF, which is what makes the content invisible on screen and on paper. Be aware of the distinction that matters for genuinely sensitive redaction: covering text is not the same as deleting the underlying text object, and a determined reader with the right tools may still recover what sits beneath the box. For casual tidying — hiding a phone number before forwarding a document — it is entirely appropriate. For legal or regulatory redaction where recovery would be damaging, use a dedicated redaction tool that provably strips the underlying content.

What size and type of PDF can I edit?

Up to 100 MB. The limit exists because the whole document is held in your browser's memory rather than streamed through a server, and beyond that size a typical laptop tab starts to struggle. Password-protected PDFs need unlocking first — our Unlock PDF tool does that on our server, one of the few steps that isn't local — and the editor will tell you plainly if that is what it has run into rather than blaming your file.

Will my edits work in Adobe Acrobat and on a phone?

Yes. The output is a standard PDF written with pdf-lib: text uses the standard PDF fonts, images are embedded as normal XObjects, and highlights use the standard multiply blend mode. It opens correctly in Acrobat, Preview, Chrome's built-in viewer, Edge, and mobile readers. There is nothing browser-specific in the file you download.